In the Presence of Wonder

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

I’m not quite the same person I was a few weeks ago.  I’ve lived the last month and a half in a state of amazement.  I’ve been gazing at a miracle.  I’ve gotten teary eyed, laughed out loud, done a lot of sighing.  I’ve become a student of a newborn little girl, a granddaughter named Virginia Grace.  I’ve made myself an expert on the delicate curves of little ears, studied the tiniest little toes, witnessed a hundred expressions already on her face, some of them hilarious.  I’ve stared into brand new eyes that stared right back with disarming seriousness, as if from another world.  I have felt on my cheek the softer-than-velvet softness of an infant face.  And I have seen a son and daughter-in-law transformed, another source of awe for me. 

In our home we are in the grip of wonder and awe.  It’s amazing how little all the daily stuff matters when we are gazing at the miraculous.  In the midst of all this, I find myself rereading Psalm 8, which speaks precisely to the life-changing power of awe.  It actually speaks of newborn babies, though what it says about them isn’t exactly clear.  That’s fine by me.  It’s a psalm of wonder, and it’s as if the psalmist, gazing at newborn babies, falls into awestruck mumbling.  At the very least he or she is saying, “My God, nothing can stand against such wonders as these little ones.”

The psalmist walks out of the nursery and into the night.  He looks up into the infinite sky.  He had been gazing at the smallest, most vulnerable of wonders, and it moves him to look upward at the vastness of all the wonders about him.  How could he turn the one into the other?  Babies and galaxies shine on the same luminous web of wonders.  And the psalmist didn’t even know what we now know to be true, that babies and all of us and all things in the world are literally made of stardust.

How can we not be amazed?  We exist amid immensities of glory; how can we not live out our days awestruck?  But largely we don’t.  We are on the one hand pragmatic people, obsessed with knowing the facts and getting the job done relative to the facts.  And we are on the other hand people enthralled with entertainment who are given, when we are not working, to amusing ourselves.  So little time is given to stillness, silence, watchful gazing.  Life becomes the sum of mad dashes.  And you know, as I know, that this is hardly living.  A factual way to measure a life is by how many breaths are taken, but a better way to measure a life is in how many moments we are so present to the sacred that the breath is taken away.

To be true to what I’m trying to say I have no business getting all didactic.  We just need to hear Psalm 8 sing and then to sing our own little song of wonder with it, hoping we recognize there’s such a song within us to sing and that it would be right and good and honest to live as if it were so.

I don’t know where you might go to find yourself awestruck.  I have found my place; it is a little girl warmly held in my arms.  When I look into her face I see the face of love there.  I can trace the sign of the cross on that beautiful brow.  All I have to do is pay attention – be silent, watch, listen, ponder, and surrender myself to be grasped by wonder. Amazing!!